Linux has one, last, chance to become the No1 OS in a particular consumer-oriented market (not counting servers): the mobile phone market. The open nature and yes, the hype around Linux has made lots of mobile-oriented companies to consider using Linux for their next-generation cellphones. But there is a major problem on the way to success, a problem which is created not by Linux itself, but by the greed and close-mindness of these same companies that endorse Linux.

That's the stupidest argument I've read thus far. That would be like someone in 1984 saying "why should Macintosh have a GUI when no other personal computers do?" I thought the idea was to challenge the status quo and not just accept what everybody else is doing.

Welcome to the real world. Cell phone manufacturers have no incentive what so ever to make their products compatible at this point in time. Until they do, don't expect them to bother standarizing. Do you think Apple would have developed the GUI if they didn't think it would benefit them?

Is there some advantage to the rest of the cellphones being noncompatible? Can you possibly see the advantage from a developer's standpoint of having compatibility within the Linux platforms? Do you see *some* overlap in effort here by the four competing Linux-based platforms? Can you imagine that collaboration could strengthen the four Linux smartphone platforms, and as a result benefit us all?

This is an industry which used to write a new OS for each and every model line. Cell phone providers are perfectly happy making things difficult for developers and developers are perfectly happy having things be difficult as long as they can continue charging 10x more than what a PC developer would be able to charge for an app. The fact that users are inconvienced is irrelevant. Users are far more inconvienced by poor coverage, dropped calls, incompatible networks, etc. And yet, for all that, people are continuing to migrate to cell phones. Of the list of problems regarding cell phones, source or binary compatibility across phones is about second or third from the bottom.